One of the purposes of HTML initially was to display a webpages characteristics (such as use of italics). Use of CSS sheets shifted the design of sites to be interpretted rather than stated... E.g use of emphasis may vary from CSS designs

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By Daniel CassidyMicroformats and FOAF

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Background: The Semantic WebWhat do these sentences mean to you? “I’m off to ComicCon on the 25-02-10 in London, who’s in?”-Jess Smith, social networker extraordinaire Hi! My name’s Joseph and welcome to my site, I live in my mansion in San Fran, work for Google and am a big fan of MJ’s music.-Joe Bloggs, amateur bloggerWhat do these sentences really mean to a machine?...

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And FOAF?FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a way for machines to understand social relationships and users.E.g. Joe Bloggs is a fan of Michael Jackson, has a girlfriend called Jess and had met Jess’ friend ‘Dave’. &lt;a href=&quot;http://michaeljackson.com/&quot; rel=&quot;follower not met&quot;&gt;MJ&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://jessisthebest.net/&quot; rel=&quot;sweetheart date met&quot;&gt;Jane&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://Davestoppatippas.net/&quot; rel=&quot;met acquaintance&quot;&gt;Dave&lt;/a&gt;

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Benefits Useful for: Crawlers, spiders, web aggregators.Reduces need for human admin/input.May improve Search traffic to websites/quality of traffic/relevance to profiled users (e.g. People with google accounts)Increasing integration of semantic text in a way that benefits users:Accessing and archiving data better.One format for both humans and machines to understand (vs. XML languages)Understanding relationships and our contributions across multiple disaggregated sites.Flexibility for users to do it ‘their own way’ without any disadvantages. E.g. Blog vs. FacebookUbiquity – “get-vcard”

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DrawbacksStill in development. (‘follower’ vs. ‘fan’)Host’s document needs to support XHTMLWill increase the demand on bandwidth as data gets richer (e.g. RSS feeds and other syndication services)Still a degree of rigidity and inherently will become more complex.Dangers of machine accessible informationhttp://pleaserobme.com/Fraud/Spam

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Useful examples/further researchhttp://microformats.org/wiki/hcardhttp://microformats.org/wiki/class-nameshttp://hresume.weblogswork.com/hresumecreator/(for those looking to publicise themselves on the web for their next job...)http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro (examples of the XFN microformat)http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/79 (if you have 45mins spare...interesting though.)